A New Stage I Don't Like

A little bit ago one of the updates from Baby Center told me that my children would start showing that they preferred Mom and Dad over other people.

Sam and Anna must have read that update, too.

We've hit a oh-so-fun stage where most of the time only Mom (and sometimes Dad) can feed them and maybe hold them.

It really stinks when you have relatives visiting from out of state for a week and could actually get help/a break from feeding once in a while. But nope. Anna seems to be worse than Sam- she won't even let her grandmother feed her or hold her. So even though I have reinforcements, I'm still feeding two mouths pretty much by myself most of the day.

Their personalities are coming out a little bit more every day. And boy, does Anna sure have some fiery personality!

She has decided she doesn't want help to go to sleep, and actually gets more mad when you try to hold her to help her get drowsy. Don't even try to rock or sway- she'll shriek! So although it just feels so wrong to do, we finally figured out the best thing to do is just lay her in her crib swaddled and awake (and usually crying because you have to carry her to get her there), then tell her it's time to sleep and sweet dreams. Then she cries for a minute, stops on her own and falls asleep. If we continue to intervene and rock/shush/sway/pat/hold her instead, it could take 30 minutes or so before she'd exhaustedly give up.

Sounds great in theory, because then I can immediately turn to Sam and work on getting him drowsy when I'm parenting solo during the day. And I guess it means that she's learned how to self-soothe. BUT- we haven't figured out what to do then when she wakes mid-nap and doesn't soothe herself back to sleep. Which did happen a few times in the last few days. Picking her up doesn't work because it just fires her up more. AND- how to get her to sleep when we're out and about? Boy, babies always keep you guessing, just when you think you've figured something out!